Category: ecommerce

The DAO is a Decentralized Autonomous Organization (“DAO”) – more specifically, it is a new breed of human organization never before attempted. The DAO is borne from immutable, unstoppable, and irrefutable computer code, operated entirely by its members, and fueled using ETH which Creates DAO tokens.

Thus spoke The DAO.
Which is just one possible way to implement Decentralized Autonomous Organizations.

A translation attempt into plain English may sound like this:

In traditional western economies, capital ownership, production and consumption are separated entities:

Uber investors pour billions of USD into a company they own.

The drivers invest into production (CAPEX like cars, OPEX like gas and insurances, their time) and pay their USD tribute to Uber’s shareholders.

Passengers pay USD for the ride.

A decentralized autonomous organization isn’t a shareholder construct, but a stakeholder model based upon securely transferable crypto tokens.

Every token holder is a stakeholder in the DAO’s ecosystem

Tokens can be held …

… or circulated to pay for services rendered or products received …

… or exchanged into another crypto token (e.g. Bitcoin) or any legacy currency

It’s a radically different type of participatory economy and may offer the chance to fix a dangerous flaw of our current monetary system:
– the “real” economy is dwarfed by an unbridled financial system
– the financial sector is pretty much decoupled from the “real”, productive economy
– but both spheres share the same tokens to exchange value: our traditional currencies like the EUR, the GBP or the USD
– those currencies are basically minted and controlled by the aforementioned financial sector.

A DAO token works like a programmable complementary currency. Traditional alternative systems looked like the Wörgl Schilling: a piece of paper used to locally exchange value to keep external problems at bay. Being just locally accepted is the key constraint – and the defining feature. Because the intent behind is purely local.

DAO tokens resemble complimentary currencies in this. They are constrained currencies. Traditional currencies are pretty much universal: highly fungible currencies like the USD or the EUR can be used to pay for any kind of product or service or asset pretty much all over the globe.

The Wörgl Schilling was only valid in Wörgl, the Bavarian Chiemgauer is only accepted in this beautifully set local economy:

… but not in Wörgl, located just a one hour car drive further down south in Austria.

Like with traditional complimentary currencies, the DAO token’s constraint is it’s limitation to a specific economy. It may be tied to a locality (like with the Chiemgauer) or a specific private entity (like airline miles, which are a certain form of private currency) – but is much more versatile.

In the DAO, the token is not only used to exchange value.

Every token owner is a stakeholder of the specified economy.

The token itself is programmable. Ideally, it becomes an intrinsic part of the whole process, not just the value exchange.

Token holders are a bit like owners of printed bearer shares: he who owns the physical share is the rightful owner of the asset represented in the paper. The company’s central ledger only lists the shares, but knows nothing about their ownership.

Crypto tokens, be it DAO or Bitcoin, pretty much automate all authentication, validation and transaction processes needed with an amazingly safe technology. Traditionally, all those transactions are safeguarded by a central authority. To buy shares of a company, you need to trust the company as the issuer, the stock exchange as the trade facilitator, the clearing house as the middleman, the settlement process for the exchange of assets (money/shares), and the custodian for administering your held securities.

Crypto transactions are pretty much trustless, meaning: as long as the crypto process is untainted, the whole chain of the transaction, from trade facilitation, clearing, settlement to custody services is inherently secure.

So how come somebody can instigate a rather dubious $79 million transaction?

Let’s go back to the trustless thing. If you read really carefully, you might have noticed I left an important piece out of the trustless specification: the issuer of the share.

And here’s the reason. Meet Victor Lustig. The man who sold the Eiffel Tower – twice. His con was actually pretty hilarious. He convinced a couple of Parisian scrap metal moguls that he represents the French government and they should bribe him for the right to melt down the rusting iron world wonder.

Some misplaced trust in charming Lustig later, the tower was still standing, the government still the owner of the cast iron hulk and Lustig’s target, one of the scrap metal dealers, a bit richer in experience and bit poorer in funds.

Every transaction is a chain of trust. The perceived transaction started with a land register certifying the French government as the rightful owner of the tower and ended with a cash transfer, a trusted means of value exchange.

But in the Eiffel Tower case, the starting point of the trust chain was Lustig and his made-up credentials. Or, to use crypto speak: the Genesis transaction was not building and owning the tower, but Lustig coming up with a fake identity and a masterfully implemented storyline.

Let’s go back to the DAO. In a rather spectacular crowd funding, a quite substantial amount of (crypto) money was raised. The basic premise:

Historically, corporations have only been able to act through people (or through corporate entities that were themselves ultimately controlled by people). This presents two simple and fundamental problems. Whatever a private contract or public law require: (1) people do not always follow the rules and (2) people do not always agree what the rules actually require.

One more story, one of my all-time favorites. The California electric grid operator built a set of rules for generating, distributing and paying for electricity. Those rules were dumb and bad. If you read them carefully and greedily, you could get paid silly amounts of money for generating electricity, not because the electricity was worth that much but because you found a way to exploit the rules. JPMorgan read the rules carefully and greedily, and exploited the rules. It did this openly and honestly, in ways that were ridiculous but explicitly allowed by the rules. The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission fined it $410 million for doing this, and JPMorgan meekly paid up. What JPMorgan did was explicitly allowed by the rules, but that doesn’t mean that it was allowed. Just because rules are dumb and you are smart, that doesn’t always mean that you get to take advantage of them.

Contracts have always been a complicated affair. Because they have to formalize a stable framework around fuzzy intentions by using language – which as a tool is inherently fuzzy as well.

The proposed solution for this inherent fuzziness created by the mismatches of intent and description and the thereby caused mismatching realities is probably a bit too ambitious: bug free software.

And what do you know: somebody smart quickly outsmarted the contract.

I have carefully examined the code of The DAO and decided to participate after finding the feature where splitting is rewarded with additional ether. I have made use of this feature and have rightfully claimed 3,641,694 ether, and would like to thank the DAO for this reward.

It’s unclear if the text has been written by the hacking trickster, who just wants to add a bit of insult to the injury. But the consequences of his contract are actually rather unclear as well. He may just be entitled to keep the load.

Because The DAO as a non-organisation constructed itself around the premise of its own infallibility. Read this part of self descriptive hubris:

The DAO will be deployed as an exact implementation of the Standard DAO Framework. The Whitepaper therefore describes perfectly how the DAO functions and is a great place to start learning more.

In the DAO’s belief system, acts of people are the problem, so let’s move them out of the equation. This created an entity ready to be preyed upon by other people of rather questionable intent. With the attack vector being people not being able to create 100% perfect contracts.

Hard core smart contractors don’t see a problem with this. Win some, loose some: it’s part of the package of immutability. Changing the rules after the fact may be technically possible, but violates the core principle of a Decentralized Autonomous Organization. Rolling back those transactions by an deus ex machina-act would inherently destroy the trust in the perfect engine: mind you, it worked actually without a fault.

Which is probably right. Because in their hubris, The Dao tried to construct themselves as an infallibility engine without any meaningful mechanisms for mediation or arbitration or recourse. And saving The DAO by ex-post changes might really hurt the underlying case for Decentralized Autonomous Organizations.

On the other hand: creating a machine, which enables smart contract-con men to systematically defraud unsuspecting token investors, who wouldn’t have any path of recourse at all … this sounds like a solid way to implement fringe system of very limited reach and effect.

Blockchains and smart contracts are amazing new tools in our overall technological toolset. We have to learn how to deploy them to the best uses (many of which have yet to be invented). That will take failures. The DAO is not the first one (e.g., Mt. Gox) and won’t be the last one.

Unfortunately, the first DAO failure might have been somewhat expensive.

This year, I was sitting with a rather baffling question. What if there is a kind of successful product in the market, you do lots of research and such. But in the end, you still ask yourself: so what are those users really doing there? You can always ask them nicely. But you know, there’s this difference between stated preferences and reality. Ask people, and they read the NY Times and watch CNN. See the data, and you won’t believe what happens next.

Right. Stated preferences mostly reveals more about the guy asking than what’s really going on. People try to keep up appearances. That’s the human condition. If you’re not a registered sociopath or a saint or another type of fringe personality.

All users lie. But only if you ask for it.

#JTBD to the rescue

Guess what. There’s a really nice solution out there. Because the problem of not knowing what your customers really do and want is a fairly common one. Clayton Christensen, professor at the Harvard Business School, came up with the concept in the 90ies.

Jobs To Be Done refers to the core concept behind: people don’t buy “a product”. They “hire” a product to get a “job” done. Have a look at those four guys in a subway car. The “job” is always the same: How to not get bored on a subway ride. But three totally different products got “hired”. A book, a smartphone, a magazine (we don’t know about the gentleman to our left).

But that’s not the hard part. The hard part is finding out what the job really is people hire your product for. Think about a newspaper publishers. A weekend issue of the NY Times is a nice thing to stack up in your spacious living room. But unfolding it on the A-train needs lots of manual dexterity, yogi-like body mastery and a certain disregard for the people sitting next to you. It took decades to come up with newspapers sized for subway rides (and no, the NY Times isn’t one of them).

One job, 3 different products hired.

The beauty of Christensen’s concept is its simplicity:

“The fact that you’re 18 to 35 years old with a college degree does not cause you to buy a product,” Christensen says. “It may be correlated with the decision, but it doesn’t cause it. We developed this idea because we wanted to understand what causes us to buy a product, not what’s correlated with it. We realized that the causal mechanism behind a purchase is, ‘Oh, I’ve got a job to be done.’ And it turns out that it’s really effective in allowing a company to build products that people want to buy.”

You want more? Watch Christensen a bit more in detail.

To get to the bottom of the jobs question, you start with interviews. No surprise. What you want is an xray of your customers mindset when he’s using your product, when he decided to buy, and finding out what is really the job he is solving by using it. So you better start talking, and forget all your assumptions (even if they turn out right).

The interview style is pretty interesting: laid back and trying not to be leading you walk your customers along a scripted timeline. I liked it. Seems like my former journalistic life not only lead to excessive noseyness (an occupational hazard). But then, I had some help (thanks, Tor) and many helpful resources. The Jobs be Done Handbook might look rather pricey for being a self-published booklet of just a handful of pages and really hideous typesetting. But hey, it get’s its job done.

More of a challenge: most scripts, guides to scripts and examples of interviews out there are geared towards real products, bricks and mortar style. Tangible goods. Which makes it a bit hard to follow advice like “build around the Point of Sales“. As the PoS will be most likely your customer’s living room.

But hey, I got it to work. It’s just that the how part might have to become another post.

A tl;dr might go like this: the crypto currency express is leaving now. Please take your seat and learn your magic – or stay a muggle.

No, really. As Arthur C. Clarke wrote in his third law of prediction: Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. And if you follow the arguments of two authors of the study, you will probably want to board the train to a virtual Hogwarts ASAP.

The authors know pretty well what they are talking about: Sander Duivestein is a software engineer and works at VINT, the trendwatching think tank of Sogeti (which is a subsidiary of french IT giant Cap Gemini S.A.). His co-author Patrick Savalle is the founder and technical director of Mobbr, a brand new payment platform for network economics, based in the Netherlands.

They start with a nice intro why the current trend of economist debunking Bitcoin is not Hogwarts, but hogwash. Like Alan Greenspan asking for its intrinsic value, just seeing a bubble. As his contributions to the Great Recession are quite undisputed, the verdict of the co-creator of the largest financial bubble of the history of finance could have some weight.

But Duivestein and Savalle treat the aging economists quite nicely (There is a lot of confusion about bitcoin.) They could have quoted Clarke’s first law. When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.

But they do explain to everybody, what the real, technological impact is.

Thanks to the Bitcoin protocol (crucially distinct from bitcoin, the currency it underlies), for the first time in history it is possible to transfer property rights (such as shares, certificates, digital money, etc.) in a fast and transparent way, which cannot be forged.

Moreover, these transactions can take place without the involvement of a trusted intermediary such as a government, notary, or bank. Anyone who fully appreciates these attributes will immediately acknowledge the tremendous value of Bitcoin.

It’s the platform, stupid! And this platform can have some serious implications for anybody’s way of doing business. Just have a look at the all the oversized successes of the Internet economy. What do Twitter, Facebook, Google, Yahoo have in common? They are media businesses. Their business model is advertising, meaning: they have found no intrinsic way to make users want to pay for the services they render. More than one eight of the world population uses Facebook quite extensively. But they need to extract their value exclusively from third parties.

Or look at the posterboys of the sharing economy, like AirBnB, Uber, Lyft. They are all highly centralized businesses, which outsource the grunt work to some local drone (who might even get sued for making a couple of Dollars or Euros on the side). I love AirBnB. But as a company, they’re the 1% of the digital Uberclass.
Bitcoin pioneers a different model: everyone becomes a stake- and shareholder in this new networked economy.

Bitcoin is key to the success of the Collaborative Economy. Bitcoin enables a frictionless and transparent way of sharing ideas, media, products, services and technology between people without the interference of corporations and governments.

It’s ideas like the DAC (Digital Autonomous Corporation, or Community), the Decentralized Application (DA), which are driving the process. Sometimes a bit wild-eyed. But hey, Bitcoin shows a valid path: it’s a completely bootstrapped economy, still in beta and its infancy, with a market cap of 10 bn USD (not counting the capitalizations of the startups and businesses – just the money rolling around in the system).

In a system like this, ownership rights can flow through the Internet like ‘normal’ content (from e-mail to video streaming) already does. And no one can dispute or counterfeit who has ownership. It is safe, transparent, and mathematically secure.

What we see is an emerging commercial operating system, on top of the global communications layer the Internet already offers.

What we enter, is a totally unchartered area. At the Inside Bitcoins-conference in Berlin, even the crypto-savvy lawyers talking about “Emerging Issues in Regulatory Compliance and Law Enforcement Efforts” were a bit out-of-bounds, when asked about the legal ramifications of DACs and DAs. Think about an autonomous soda machine and …

… who exactly is legally and economically responsible (say, if someone were to get sick from a can of soda from one of these machines, for example).

So why touch crazy stuff like this anyway? Duivestein and Savalle have a historic answer:

In 1937 Ronald Coase published a groundbreaking article, The Nature of the Firm. In it he posed a very simple question: “Why do firms exist?”.

In his research he came up with the concept of transaction costs to explain the nature and limits of firms. Companies exist primarily because the underlying coordination mechanisms of the market aren’t perfect.

According to Mitt Romney, corporations are people (which sounds nicer than saying corporations are oversized homunculi). But the basic idea is already nicely embodied (sic!) in the English term “incorporating”: you give a transactional structure a legal body (sic!). Coase gave the answer to the nowadays mostly unasked question why we are doing that. Yes, deflecting liabilities can play a role here. But at its core it’s all about transaction costs.

Young Harry entering Hogwarts.

Of course, the crypto currency based democratization of money and finance can be a scary thing as well.

Like any powerful technology, Bitcoin can either be seen as a Pandora’s box, or as a step towards Utopia. Bitcoin just obeys the First Law of Technology:“Technology is neither good nor bad; nor is it neutral”.Asking yourself whether Bitcoin will fail is like questioning yourself whether technology can be “un-invented”.

If you accept that there’s magic, you may ignore it at your own peril. Even if you hide all evidence in a tiny cabinet under your stair case, you might still end up as a pigtailed Muggle.

It is much better to experiment and innovate with this new platform.

And not just that. Becoming an active participant means you can shape this really new economy. Because, to stay in the metaphor: The “You-Know-Who” and “He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named” will there be present as well, not just young Harry and his merry band of friends.

So, let’s end with Clarke, again, quoting his 2nd law of prediction. Please don’t forget: he was a prediction pro. In 1945, as a Sci Fi writer, he proposed the rather farfetched idea of putting communication satellites into a geostationary orbit, now sometimes nicknamed the Clarke Orbit. Farfetched, because it took another 12 years until the Russians launched Sputnik (first satellite ever) and another seven years for NASA to launch Syncom, the first geostationary communications satellite.
So, what is Clarke’s final advice:

The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.

Here we go. A single Bitcoin is now worth more than one thousand Dollars. Success, success. Well, kind of.

Scary currency or great investment? Highly volatile, but going up up up.

I don’t want to be a spoil sport, but let me dissect a bit what’s going on there. If you see Bitcoin as a currency to run your everyday business with, you run into some really crazy problems.
First thing, if you’re a mom and pop store, your accountant will have to introduce you into a multicurrency environment – which has to deal with a type of currency, which makes the volatility of old Italian Lira look like an easy thing to handle. All spikes and drops have to be accounted for for your taxes. And drops can have the unpleasant side effect that you finally make a loss on a deal, which was decently profitable when it took place.

The far more complicated part for Bitcoin as a currency (as in medium of exchange) is the built-in deflationary mechanism. The number of coins is finite (and even shrinking over time, as coins are misplaced, destroyed without a backup,…). So as long as there enough people buying, prices will go up driving more people into the system leading prices to go up and so on and so on.

Now, if inflation is bad and the opposite of deflation, deflation must be the opposite of bad? Unfortunately not. Deflation is bad as well.
A smoothly running economy is like stepping outside and it’s springtime, about 20°C (or 68°F for Americans or 293.15 Kelvin for all you mad scientists out there). Birds are tweeting. Bees and flowers everywhere. Everything is well and fine. But here it comes, the two endemic threats towards your monetary wellbeing:

Inflation superheats your environment to temperatures way above the boiling point. If it really gets going, there’s no real way to stop the heat until everything’s cooked way beyond well done. Wood incinerates. Metals evaporate. The end.
And, talking about inflation, economywise, your money (and all your debts, you lucky b*st*rd) evaporates as well.

Deflation cools everything down. 0 Kelvin (or -273.15°C) means: complete standstill. Hell freezes over. The end.
Economywise what’s happening is that nobody want to invest into anything anymore – besides the deflationary currency. Buying is postponed indefinitely, as prices are in a free fall. The beers I paid for with Bitcoins just a year ago (no, I didn’t; it’s a metaphor!) are now worth an iPad Air with 64GB. An exchange rate of 1 BTC = 10.000 USD doesn’t look to farfetched. And we’re not talking really longterm here: the last tenfold increase took about a year. Do you really want to buy a beer right now – or save this BTC for now and buy yourself a Ferrari the day after tomorrow?

Which just translates into: in its current state, BTC is a really crappy medium of exchange. But an interesting money store. Highly speculative, with really interesting and not as common risk factors involved. But, hey: as long as it works, it works.

For some people it already worked pretty well. A friend of mine told me about a developer he met. He literally had found on his hard disk a stash of 40 BTC he had bought way back then and completely had forgotten about. The windfall buys him a brand new car – if he’s cashing in now.

It’s stories like this driving the BTC universe. And rightly so. Because investing in BTC isn’t any more esoteric than buying synthetic ETFs, investing in a growth stock (meaning: a company which is not making any money in the foreseeable future, but grows at a maddening speed, while nurturing the promise of phenomenal future riches wich are priced into their stock price as of today), buying yourself some rare stamps, or spending all your disposable EUR and USD and whatevers on fine arts or collectibles like signed baseball trading cards.
It’s fun, it’s risky, it’s exciting, and there might be a monetary benefit coming out of your actions (or inactions, see above).

But wait. The really good about Bitcoin is not just enabling you to make a quick buck (or loosing as quickly).
The really good about Bitcoin is about being what it technically is: a cryptocurrency, which at the same time is a rather volatile (meaning: still crappy) medium of exchange, a quite exciting value store (meaning: of highly speculative interest) – and a software platform for trustless transactions.

The equation goes a bit like this, with

A being the great growth in exchange value driving people and monies into platform development

and

B to be defined as the possibilities coming with the promise of becoming a universal medium of exchange, which keeps people and monies in the game.

And now, tadah:

A + B = C

And C stand for:

the resulting Bitcoin-related cryptocurrency software and platforms exceeding by far the effects of Bitcoin as a currency.

Trustless transactions is one of the major keywords here.
If you look at any kind of transaction between parties, basically we’re looking at a construct of a trustworthy contract between trusted parties using a trusted system. If you buy some real estate, you do want to know that you really bought yourself the Eiffel Tower from this trustworthy seller, when the trusted notary signed off the deal.

Trustless systems take most of this load off you. Because you do not have to trust all participants in the transaction. The model established by Bitcoin works pretty well for currency-type transactions. But there are already system out there using the infrastructure for something quite different. Since a couple of months, a group of students around Cornell’s Emin Gün Sirer is running the Virtual Notary.
With the following caveat:

It is not an official, legally-recognized notary, whose definition is provided by law, whose statements are court-recognized, and whose procedures are regulated. For operations that require legal standing, you should seek the help and services of an official, state-recognized notary. Please do not use Virtual Notary for something critical, like your will — you should enlist the services of a lawyer and a certified notary public.

The Virtual Notary does some nice and fancy things by itself. But finally leaves some code in the Bitcoin blockchain, using it as a public ledger, which cannot be altered.
In the same area, but pretty new around the block is Proof Of Existence. The service allows you to anonymously and securely store an online distributed proof of existence for any document and looks amazingly easy to use, with Argentine developer Manuel Aráoz suddenly finding itself at the center of interest of some quite interesting folks.

Mastercoin is to bitcoin as HTTP is to TCP/IP.

The real fun starts with two different approaches. Both are not just about leveraging the existing Bitcoin infrastructure, but by enhancing it by establishing new protocols on top of the Bitcoin protocol. That’s why J.R. Willett, masterbrain behind the Mastercoin project, claims for himself to be the author of The Second Bitcoin Whitepaper (with the legendary inventor of Bitcoin, Satoshi Nakamoto, who more or less singlehandedly started the whole craze, being the author of whitepaper No. 1).

Mastercoin is to Bitcoin as HTTP is to TCP/IP, Willett writes on Quora. We’re building a new protocol layer on top of Bitcoin with a dizzying array of cool features that have never even been done before anywhere. Things like distributed exchange, distributed betting, distributed e-commerce, and coins which can track external values like gold or U.S. Dollars without trusting a human being to back them.

Colored Coins: exchanging value over the net.

Maybe even more exciting are the possibilities of Colored Coins, as it seems, well, a bit more open than the fairly closely held Mastercoin-project.Colored Coins is an open standard protocol, just like http and bittorrent, to exchange value over the internet, as they state rather matter of factly. Today there is no such standard for an exchange of value on the internet … Today Bitcoin is an amazing protocol, but the only asset you can hold on Bitcoin is the BTC.

For ages and ages, humankind had the dream of flying. It took millenia to finally get us up in the air, safe landings included. And it took us just a couple of decades to mess everything up.

The endless wisdom of Google (Germany) has the right answer. The top result for a search on Flying leads you to the Flying Pizza franchise (and their Currywurst Pizza). Serves you right, Lufthansa et al. I’m not even talking about abominations like senseless strip searches or the mandatory disposing of dangerous materials like tooth paste and half empty bottles of soda water. Or RyanAir and their creative close-enough redrawing of maps (if you could book with RyanAir a flight to Mars, you might deboard on Venus).

The senseless part starts at the very moment you book any flight on any airline website. Can you imagine any retailer charging you a checkout fee? So could anybody please explain why me doing the job of a travel agents leads to me having to pay a “ticketing surcharge”.